Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

Selena walked straight up to him and kissed him on the side of his face, forgiving him, and reclaiming him for the benefit of anyone who might be watching.

There was hardly a single woman in the room who hadn’t watched her take Walter into the Ladies and was gripped by whatever might happen next. They had seen him hurry out looking sheepish and heard about their little performance from the girls who had caught them together. Siobhan had left only fifteen minutes before.

What slags Selena and Walter were!

That’s what they were thinking.

For Selena, looking around at the envious women in the club, it was a brief moment of careless triumph that echoed—whenever she looked back on it—over and over again so annoyingly that it seemed more like a bad dream than a conquest.

For seconds after that moment, Selena’s prospects with Walter were dashed.

Indeed her sister Siobhan’s marriage was dashed in any case, even if she wasn’t about to blow it up. Even my daughter Rain’s future as her possible replacement was dashed.

Into the club walked a girl I hadn’t seen since Walter and Siobhan’s wedding some two years before. I mentioned that at the wedding Selena had fluttered around me for a while, and I had been diverted.

This was the girl who had diverted me.

We called her Floss.

Florence Agatha Spritzler was twenty when we all saw her walk into Dingwalls just as Walter was starting the second set of what would turn out to be his last performance with Big Walter and His Stand. He would probably remember her—if he remembered her at all—as the gawky eighteen-year-old friend of Selena’s who hung out with her at his wedding to Siobhan a little over two years earlier.

She looked around and spotted Selena at the bar and hurried over to her side, no doubt so she could feel established safely somewhere in the heaving crowd.

They embraced, laughing, friends from school in Acton from the age of twelve, a few years after the Collinses had landed in London. They seemed completely at ease together. It was Selena who had christened her Floss.

The nickname had begun of course as Flossie—after Florence—but taken on its rather dental spin when Floss blackened one of her front teeth falling from a pony when she was fourteen. The damaged tooth was perhaps equal to the deliberate flaw the Persian carpet maker weaves into his rugs so they do not attempt to challenge God’s perfection. With a bright white set of teeth she would have smiled more readily, and if she had done so she would have set the room ablaze. Her natural blond hair used to be quite long, but I learned later that she had had it cut very short just the day before.

I remembered her arriving at the wedding; that was before whatever drugs I had decided would improve the day narrowed my vision like a black curtain slowly closing on a brightly lit stage, then blacked me out completely. She was swinging her hair as she walked, which had been an eye-catching feature about her; maybe she felt it helped to detract attention from her mouth. Her nose had a slight upward tilt, and her bright blue eyes set off her classic good looks. She was youthful, and most certainly English, a rose. I say this because her surname was Spritzler, making some people wonder if she might be German. In fact she had been adopted at birth from a convent in Switzerland by Albert, a very capable Austrian surgeon, and his English wife Katharine.

When they were young teenagers, while Selena ran around like a hippy claiming to heal her friends’ chakras with angelic powers, Floss learned to ride, and her affluent adoptive parents—relieved at first that she had stumbled on a normal, well-brought-up girl’s pursuit—bought her a young thoroughbred colt and a transport box so she could compete in dressage events and gymkhanas. Selena and Floss were best friends who felt centered in the hub of the same wheel. As young teenagers they had been wild, and sometimes had much older boyfriends, but together they were extremely strong, resilient, taking nothing too seriously, laughing at men who found them attractive, intoxicated simply by each other’s sense of humor and what appeared to be shared silliness. Beneath the surface they were not silly at all; they both had deeply held ambitions. They each felt they knew what was in the future.

Selena was certain she would depose Siobhan and marry Walter; her angels would guide him to her. I learned later that Floss, not wanting to compete, knew for certain she would never marry a man who wanted to spend his life playing in a band in pubs. She would marry a man who would at least be willing to live close to the greenbelt of London, near Richmond or Hampstead where she could have horses and ride every day, perhaps run a stud. So her future husband would need money. In her mind she envisioned a banker, a stock exchange trader, or a very capable Queen’s Counsel. She knew she might not be posh enough to hook such a man, but she also knew her parents had a wide circle of friends in the medical world, so maybe she would meet a rich young plastic surgeon.

There were other possibilities. For instance, Floss seemed interested in Frank Lovelace. She was whispering to Selena and gesturing in our direction along the bar where I stood with Frank.

I felt sure she must remember and recognize me, and I waved, but she seemed focused on Frank.

“That girl was at Walter’s wedding,” I almost had to shout in Frank’s ear; the music was suddenly rather loud in the bar. “Looks like you might have pulled.”

“Florence Spritzler,” said Frank. “I know her. Friend of Selena’s. Horsey girl. Doesn’t come here much.”

He sauntered over and started to chat to her. His manner was cocksure, overconfident, really quite irritating.

I was fifty-one, and Frank was probably only just past forty, but damn—he was just as much too old for her as I was.

I was deeply jealous. I felt absurd, ridiculous, and reminded myself that my days of drinking, drugging, and chasing women half my age were now behind me. Even so, I wanted to be in Frank’s place, close to her, to make her smile despite her blackened tooth.

In the months to come I got to know her. There was something careless about Floss, something impetuous and daring that promised adventure. But if she wished she could eat you alive. There was a determination and tenacity about her. Charming, but intensely focused on whatever was in her mind, and to whomever she was addressing or listening to.

Yes, the fact is I found her diverting.

I hardly noticed at first when Crow pulled at my arm. Walter and the rest of the band were already onstage and ready to restart.

I turned to face Crow.

“What have you done to Walter?” Crow’s deadpan face was only a few inches from my own. “He’s been hearing strange sounds.”

“I’ve tried to help him,” I spluttered. I admit to being slightly frightened of Crow.

“Why have you always tried to fill his head with all that New Age shit?” Crow was almost spitting.

“That is not what I’ve done,” I protested.

Crow wasn’t listening. He started to poke my chest with his index finger, and it hurt. He had powerful, bony, guitar player’s fingers. “This band is all I’ve got, Louis. Don’t fuck it up.”

Walter called him from the stage.

“I’ll speak to you again later,” said Crow as he turned to go onstage. “And I’ll kill fucking Frank as well. This band is not about money, or art, it’s about truth.”

Crow left me, still muttering, and stalked in his Doc Martens like an angry catwalk model to the stage and picked up his guitar.

The last show at Dingwalls by Big Walter and His Stand would quickly pass into legend. I’d never heard the band play with such ferocity. They played their closing number, their Ford song, as though trying to smash it into the ground, to destroy it, to make it unusable.